I used to sit home with my computer and write. After the Newbery, I probably spend more than half my time on the road.

God bless Interlibrary Loan. I pay a lot of library fines. In the case of 'A Single Shard,' I was using books that hadn't been checked out in 30 years, so I didn't feel too bad.

In my family and among Korean-Americans, there just is no occasion that people would get together without bibimbap. It's something that people eat when they're wanting to celebrate or have a good time with friends.

If a man is keeping an idea to himself, and that idea is taken by stealth or trickery-I say it is stealing. But once a man has revealed his idea to others, it is no longer his alone. It belongs to the world.

I can give advice to anyone interested in writing in one word: Read! I think it's much more important to be a reader than to be a writer!

With a book called 'Keeping Score,' I really did want to write a book about the Korean War, because I felt that it is the least understood war in the American cultural imagination. So I set out with the idea that Americans didn't know much about the Korean War and that I was going to try to fix a tiny bit of that.

I want all my books to provoke some kind of response in the reader, to make them think something or feel something or both, and for that to become a part of them and work into their own lives.